Ever since bicycles were invented, inventors have tried to devise a comfortable bicycle saddle. When tires were wide and bicycle riding a relaxing pastime, very wide saddles with a lot of padding and even coil spring suspensions were designed and used. These types of saddles were reasonably comfortable, but were quite heavy.
As bicycles lost weight and slimmed down, even more-or-less casual riders wanted lighter and faster bicycles and many riders adopted the so-called racing saddle, which tends to have a long narrow pommel, meant to reduce the saddle's interference with the rider's thighs as they go up and down to operate the pedals. The rear portion of the racing saddle is also fairly narrow. The cover and seating surface are typically hard—not designed for comfort—but for light weight and speed.
Many of those who ride bicycles are serious riders, but not professional racers. They do not find either the plush padded and sprung saddle or the conventional hard riding saddle to be satisfactory. The heavily padded sprung saddle adds too much weight to the bicycle and interferes too much with the pumping action of the rider's thighs and would look unaesthetic on a modern bicycle built for speed. The hard racing saddle, on the other hand, is simply uncomfortable and the serious but not fanatic rider finds it terribly uncomfortable, particularly on long rides.
Efforts to have been made to find some comfortable middle ground. One approach has been to provide bicycle saddles with modest sized cushions filled with a somewhat compressible gel compound. This is similar to the heavily padded bicycle saddle but with a more dynamic shape and perhaps better cushioning, but the saddle itself is not dynamic and the only cushioning effect is derived through compressing the gel compound, which is typically locked into fixed chambers, or the soft nature of the gel compound itself. These types of saddles tend to lose any comfort benefit relative to the old large padded saddles due to their smaller size.
Other developers have tried to make a light-weight comfortable bicycle saddle by fixing an inflatable bladder of some sort onto a base and then introducing a desirable air pressure into the bladder.
These designs unnecessarily limit the potential for increasing rider comfort by attaching the perimeter of the bottom of a bladder to the co-extensive perimeter of a frame, by confining the fluid to a single closed cell or to one or more closed cells in single saddle. The internal pressure of any single cell bladder increases whenever an external force, such as a bicycle rider's weight, is applied to it, regardless of the fluid inside the bladder. The increased pressure inside the bladder will be magnified against the rider's body when the rider's weight is largely concentrated over a small area, namely the ischial tuberosity.
Therefore there is a need for a bicycle saddle that actively alleviates pressure on the rider's pressure points as the rider's weight shifts from one side to the other during the pedaling cycle. There is also a need for such a bicycle saddle that is lightweight relative to other related types of bicycle saddles.